Work Ethic and the Government’s Role

I sympathize with the farmer hiring immigrant labor. But the discussion needs some greater context. Americans are no longer familiar with farming’s backbreaking work. And it’s easy to see why. In 1790, 90 percent of our population was engaged in agriculture. Various technologies and decades of federal policy that deliberately reduced agricultural jobs have shrunk the farm community down to less than 1 percent of our population. Meanwhile far fewer of today’s Americans, just 20 percent, are employed in physically strenuous labor.

U.S. policies are nudging farm-related jobs in an evermore unappealing direction -- one that is more industrialized and chemical intensive.

Automation and mechanization are generally heralded as progress, and certainly there is much truth in that. But they have contributed to our national obesity epidemic and rendered agriculture utterly dependent on various non-renewable, polluting substitutes for human labor. The farmer’s hands, knowledge and husbandry have been replaced by machines, capital goods, pharmaceuticals and fossil fuels, used directly (to power farm equipment) and indirectly (to manufacture chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides).

Farmers of the developing world are not as far down this path; skill and sweat are the inputs of their trade. Of course, this is also true for their economies as a whole. Many immigrants from developing countries are highly motivated and undeterred by arduous physical labor in agriculture and other sectors.

U.S. agricultural policies that push farmers out of work persist. And they continue to nudge the remaining farm-related jobs in fields, at animal operations and at slaughterhouses, in an evermore unappealing direction -- one that is more industrialized and chemical intensive. This makes it increasingly difficult to attract our citizens to those jobs. This is foolhardy, particularly in our current economy, which we are desperately striving to revitalize.

Ecologically based food systems should become the United States’ overarching goal. Such a shift would invariably employ larger numbers of people while providing safer, more appealing jobs. It would also create safer, tastier, more nutritious food, something that would benefit us all.